AUSTIN, Texas — Some Austin ISD students mistakenly had their records released to people who weren't their parents or legal guardians.
According to a report from KVUE's media partners at the Austin American-Statesman, documents revealed that a special education database vendor mistakenly released the private information for about 160 Austin students in December.
The report highlighted a Dec. 16 system update that handles special education reporting, which triggered a coding error. The glitch “altered the notification settings, which sent notifications or signature requests to non-guardian contacts listed in EasyIEP,” according to the report sent to the Texas Education Association (TEA).
EasyIEP is a subsidiary product of Public Consulting Group, which, according to the Statesman, manages the special education data platform for the district.
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The issue was fixed in 24 hours, with the district and the company that runs the database reaffirming that the mistake was highly unlikely to occur again. Staff with AISD documented the incident in a Jan. 5 note to the TEA as part of an update to the state on an improvement order over the district’s special education evaluations backlog.
According to the district, the notifications were sent out at around 11 p.m. on Dec. 16. The information included links to documents with the students’ most recent record for their special education, or 504 plan, which is designed to identify and set adjustments to a child's learning process.
Staff learned about the error and contacted the vendor, which deactivated the links shortly thereafter.
Those who received the notifications were people who had been listed as secondary contacts to be used for emergencies.
KVUE reached out to AISD and the TEA for comment, but we have not heard back at the time of publication.